Wyclif's Pod pilot episode 1 - The Unjournal

Wyclif's Dust

Here is a new experiment – I’m trying a podcast

This is an interview with two of my colleagues at The Unjournal, David Reinstein and David Jintcharadze. The Unjournal is a US non-profit exploring alternatives to traditional academic peer review and journal publication. In this podcast, we range over the problems with traditional peer review, ways they are trying to improve it, and how they hope to change academia.

You can see the Unjournal’s published evaluations of scientific work at https://unjournal.pubpub.org.

This is a complete first! Apart from some excessive umming by me at the start, I thought it was fun and went well. I’d be very interested in your comments and feedback.

Highlights

0.00 Introductions for David R and Davit.
9.10 What made David R want to leave academia?
10.05 What is the problem with peer review?
19.05 What does the Unjournal do? Academic Journals versus game reviews. Unjournal evaluations.
23.40 What’s the ultimate goal? Their ideal for academia. Long-lasting research. Replacing journals. Making research impactful.
28.50 Effective Altruism and UJ. “Why this not something else?” Informing EA funding priorities.
35.50 Getting to the end goal. The American Journal of False Moustaches. Changing the system as a Stag Hunt. Replacing gold with paper currency.
40.25 How can people help? Submitting research. Becoming a paid reviewer.
42.50 Broader social science questions. Economics: poster child or problem child? RePeC and sharing papers.
48.25 What’s it like for David R leaving academia and running a non-profit? What does Davit want from academia?
52.20 DHJ doing non-academic stuff. Bad academic writing and what it tells you.